Catalyze

Rob Gourley ’18 is a documentary producer, cinematographer, and video editor based in Chico, California. During the pandemic, the alumnus was working for the Los Angeles Times as a video producer when an opportunity came up to work for PBS on a NOVA series about electric airplanes. What was intended to be a sabbatical turned into the launch of Rob’s career into freelance. Rob shares with Catalyze...

Upon his return from the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, Billy Pizer ’90 joined Catalyze to analyze the major announcements made and new global carbon market rules. The economist also shares his thoughts on the role of technologies backing cryptocurrencies in emissions reporting and payments.  Billy is the vice president for research and policy engagemen...

Since the beginning of the pandemic, millions of women have dropped out of the workforce, and many have yet to rejoin.  Ursula Dimmling Mead ’02 has been studying what women want at work for the bulk of her career. She built a tool to help women make data-informed decisions about where to apply (and where to avoid applying). Ursula is the founder and CEO of InHerSight , the largest company-reviews...

Seth Shelden ’98 is the United Nations liaison for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The coalition was awarded the Nobel Peace Price in 2017 for its work to bring about the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).  The TPNW outlaws the use, testing, development, production, possession, and transfer of nuclear weapons, and it outlines how countries can destro...

Catalyze is joined by Geoff Milliner, the COO of the Chattanooga Enterprise Center and a 2021 Civic Collaboration host for Morehead-Cain, and Montez Thomas, assistant director of scholar advising at Morehead-Cain. This episode is the second in a two-part series on the Civic Collaboration program.  The Enterprise Center tasked their team of Morehead-Cain Scholars to explore the impact of “smart cit...

Catalyze is joined by Liz Kistin Keller ’04 of the City of Albuquerque’s Office of the Mayor and a 2021 Civic Collaboration host for Morehead-Cain. This episode is the first in a two-part series on the Civic Collaboration program.  The Office of the Mayor tasked their team of Morehead-Cain Scholars to explore the online user experiences of the 50+ population in order to improve their access to int...

We’re launching our fall season with J. R. Ching ’01, the chief financial officer for Yoma Strategic Holdings. We asked J. R. to join the show to help us understand the military coup in Myanmar and to hear how his company has managed the ongoing crisis as the Delta variant continues to surge throughout the country.  Credits The music for this episode was produced and contributed by Nicholas Byrne...

Catalyze is back for the fall season, and we have a lot to share about.  RSVP for this semester’s events:  Find your class-year decade event with Morehead-Cain President Chris Bradford . Learn more about the (Mini) Forum’s events, beginning the week of November 15th and leading up to our Day of Giving . Music credits The music for this episode is by scholar Scott Hallyburton ’22, guitarist of the...

Catalyze invited Nicholas Byrne ’19 of Arts + Crafts back to the series to talk about his latest music projects, and because we thought you might want to learn more about the artist behind the music that’s featured on the show.  We first brought Nicholas to Catalyze in October 2020 as the producer, guitarist, and singer was road-tripping across the country with Eric Lee ’18 and Sam Lowe ’20.  Nich...

For this special segment of Catalyze , Emile Charles ’24 shares the most impactful aspects of his international gap year, pandemic disruptions included. The scholar interned at a children’s hospital in Cape Town, South Africa; visited his father’s Caribbean home in St. George’s, Grenada; worked on a global public health collaboration between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the...

The road that brought Chris Bradford to Chapel Hill began in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and included stops in New Haven, Connecticut; Palo Alto, California; Oundle, England; and Johannesburg, South Africa.  Chris spoke with Morehead-Cain from his home in Johannesburg to share his story of founding African Leadership Academy (ALA), his personal mission (which he says is to “build platforms that enable in...

Amber Koonce ’12 is a civil rights attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.  Amber shares how her Morehead-Cain summers working at a women’s correctional center in Ghana and at a young boys’ correctional center in Scotland helped inform her vocation to defend human rights and civil rights in representing incarcerated people, particularly people who’ve been incarcerated as children...

When reporters and public relations professionals come calling, Karen Stevenson ’79 knows what to expect: They are going to ask her about being “the first.” As a high school senior, Karen became the first African American woman to receive the Morehead-Cain Scholarship as part of the inaugural group of female Morehead-Cain Scholars. In 1979, the alumna made national headlines as the first woman fro...

Andrew Patterson ’06 is the vice president of partnerships and strategy at Greenfly, Inc., a software platform that helps organizations build their communities through brand advocacy.  Andrew shares about Greenfly’s role in connecting major sports leagues to fans through more authentic and personalized game coverage; successful strategies that the Biden campaign and 2020 Democratic National Conven...

Alan Murray ’77 is CEO of Fortune Media .  Prior to joining the media organization in 2015, Alan served as president of the Pew Research Center in Washington, D.C. For nearly two decades, he held a number of roles at The Wall Street Journal, including deputy managing editor, executive editor online, and the Washington bureau chief. Alan also served as the Washington bureau chief at CNBC and as a c...

Sarah Mackenzie ’20 of Calgary, Alberta, has received the Rhodes Scholarship to pursue a fully funded postgraduate degree at the University of Oxford beginning this fall. The recent graduate is one of 11 Canadians selected to join the 2021 cohort, and she is the 51st Rhodes Scholar from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to the University’s announcement of the award on Nove...

Our first guest for this episode is Tom Thriveni ’10, a comedy writer on The Late Late Show with James Corden on CBS. As a Morehead-Cain Scholar, he interned with Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart , an opportunity offered by Jon Benson ’06 (Jon produced field segments on the show at the time).  Following his graduation from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tom began...

We’re sharing a brief roundup from the 2020 General Election on November 3. We had a number of Morehead-Cain Alumni running for office; here’s how their races turned out.  Ricky Hurtado ’11 was elected to North Carolina’s House of Representatives. The alumnus will represent District 63 in Raleigh. The Representative-elect will be the only Latino to serve in the current state legislature, according...

We're sharing two episodes as a special miniseries on mindfulness to help you relieve some stress. The first is a 10-minute walking meditation that you can do indoors or outside (wherever you have at least 10 to 15 feet of space). This session is guided by wellness professional Jenny Cimaglia ’07.  The following episode is a five-minute breathing exercise guided by the alumna. About Jenny  Jenny C...

For the second episode in our miniseries on mindfulness, wellness professional Jenny Cimaglia ’07 guides a five-minute breathing exercise. All you need is a quiet space.  The previous episode is a 10-minute walking meditation guided by Jenny. About Jenny  Jenny Cimaglia ’07 is a yoga teacher and Reiki practitioner based in Westport, Connecticut. Following her graduation from the University of Nort...

Outside their Airbnb in Cheyenne, Wyoming, three Morehead-Cains shared about their adventures thus far in road tripping across the country with a U-Haul-turned-mobile-recording-unit.  Eric Lee ’18, Nicholas Byrne ’19, and Sam Lowe ’20 had spent the last six months or so with seven other Tar Heels on a historic farm in Colbert, Georgia. The unincorporated community called Smithonia is about 20 minu...

A performance by Sanya Shah ’22 will release this Friday, October 2, 2020, at 1 p.m. EDT through an online event hosted by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Department of Music and Arts Everywhere. Sanya (soprano) and UNC junior Lauren Ragsdale (mezzo-soprano) will perform the works of composers Florence Price and Betty Jackson King. Price became, in 1933, the first African America...

Andrew Powell ’15 and Sasha Seymore ’15 (as well as UNC alumnus and former football player Tommy Hatton) are the co-founders of Learn to Win , a mobile learning platform that uses a content creation engine and data analytics suite to build and deliver training materials for instructors, coaches, and teachers of all kinds. The two alumni worked on building the startup as undergrads at the Universit...

To launch our fall season, we spoke with John Sides ’96, a professor and William R. Kenan, Jr. Chair in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. His research focuses on comparative and American politics. The alumnus is co-author of the book, “ Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America .” John is also co-founder, form...

For our second episode of our two-part series on civic engagement, we spoke with Greear Webb ’23 of Raleigh, co-founder of Young Americans Protest (YAP!) and the NC Town Hall . At Carolina, the scholar serves on the Commission on Campus Equality and Student Equity and as co-chair of the political action committee for the Black Student Movement (BSM) at UNC-Chapel Hill. This summer, Greear was sele...